Weekly Links: October 2, 2022
Stealing medieval books, reselling electronic books, and AI doodles
Another week, more links. Interspersed are some doodles by Diffusion Bee, which I use to run the Stable Diffusion AI art program on my computer.
Stealing Medieval Bibles
This week, the Museum of the Bible, based in Washington, D.C., tried to drum up good coverage for itself by returning a medieval Orthodox manuscript from its collection to the Greek monastery where it was stolen a century ago. Eikosiphoinissa Manuscript 220, as it’s called, is a copy of the four Gospels named after the Orthodox Greek monastery that kept it for centuries. This book, and hundreds of others with it, were looted by the invading Bulgarian army in 1917. Since then, Eikosiphoinissa has been trying, mostly in vain, to recover these books.
The Museum of the Bible’s decision to return the book looks awfully generous, and they’re certainly angling for good press coverage, like they got here at CNN. The problem is, the museum only had the manuscript in the first place because they have one of the most notoriously sloppy acquisitions departments in the world of antiquities. The monastery has been asking collectors and dealers to return these books for years, and the museum’s acquisitions team either ignored these requests when they first bought it in 2014, or else missed them entirely—neither outcome is a good look.
But this is standard operating procedure for the Museum of the Bible. They’ve been caught buying artifacts from Iraqi smugglers, Egyptian smugglers, and, uh, the Islamic State (possibly). Each time, it’s been less case of malice than of plain stupidity and a lack of due diligence. Of course they wound up with looted Greek manuscripts.
Forgetting Medieval Bibles
Not that all Orthodox manuscripts are stolen, mind you. Sometimes you just leave a few hundred of them lying around in the attic, next to the family photos and that box full of old iPods and cell phones, as a Romanian church in the town of Medias found. Over two hundred books, ranging from early modern printed works to 9th century manuscripts, were simply sitting in the belfry of St. Margaret’s Church in Central Romania, most likely survivors of an older, much larger church library of seven thousand books. Researchers are already starting to match them with 19th century copies of the church’s library catalogue. They are particularly interested in some of the 16th century bindings, and there are also promising signs that some of the parchment is recycled, which means palimpsests might be recovered. Get the whole story at Medievalists.net.
Eating Books
No, not literally, but literarily. Nina Dumitrescu, over at the TLS:
The idea of eating books is more than a clever metaphor. It appears several times in Scripture, where it is connected to prophecy. I find the image again in a puzzling Old English poem now called Solomon and Saturn I, a dialogue about the Lord’s Prayer between the biblical king and a wandering scholar. It begins with Saturn describing how he has “tasted the books of all the islands” in his search for the truth. He has mastered Libyan and Greek science, and the history of the Indian empire. Yet he still longs to be overwhelmed by the prayer itself, as though all his hard-won knowledge has left him untouched.
The whole essay is short, and worth a read.
How Expensive are Digital Library Books?
Pretty expensive, it turns out, and librarians are starting to do something about it. Libraries, just like the rest of us, don’t actually own the ebooks that they lend out, but instead pay a licensing fee, which usually has to be renewed and quickly gets ruinously expensive, especially when American library budgets continue to shrink. Fight for the Future, the digital rights advocacy group, has launched a new open letter calling for changes in digital book lending laws and policies. The Authors for Libraries project writes, in an open letter:
We fear a future where libraries are reduced to a sort of Netflix or Spotify for books, from which publishers demand exorbitant licensing fees in perpetuity while unaccountable vendors force the spread of disinformation and hate for profit. Publishers must balance profits for the most prominent authors and shareholders with the right of the public to free, unsurveilled access to knowledge and information—as well as the right of emerging authors to be collected, preserved, and discovered.
There are several good ideas and links throughout, but the simplest and most important claim comes at the top: let people own ebooks. This would be great both in theory and in practice, and especially good for libraries. It would be bad for publishers, unless we can figure out the right legal language to ensure that ebook owners can only lend as many copies as they own, rather than spam out infinite copies. Still, the benefits for libraries would almost certainly outweigh the drawbacks for companies.
And that’s it for this week. Happy reading!